In Don Trump's America, You Know You Are Free When You Can Make Other People Suffer

PLUS: A review of "Dept. Q" starring Matthew Goode

Jul 13, 2025

From a darkened arena around a boxing ring, we look up at two bare chested men, one with pale, white skin and the other with brown skin, who lock arms in a boxing match in this horizontal painting. The brushstrokes are loose and visible throughout, making some details difficult to make out. The boxer to our left wears drooping, forest-green trunks and black shoes. He leans back on his bent right leg, closer to us, and tilts his face up. His mouth gapes open and his nose, chin, and neck are smeared with scarlet red, suggesting blood. His pale skin has a green cast, and his chest, arms, and legs are sinewy and muscular. His right arm is raised or pulled up overhead by the boxer to our right. Wearing dark briefs, the second boxer hunches over with head lowered toward the other man’s shoulder. He surges forward onto his deeply bent left knee, closer to us, pushing powerfully off his back leg. His face is lost in shadow and his body has less detail than his opponent, though light glints off his arching back to create gold highlights against his brown skin along his spine, ribs, and muscles of the shoulder. The men’s bodies nearly span the height of the canvas. The black ropes of the boxing ring pass in front of and behind the boxers, and the space around the ring in the top half of the painting is nearly black. Heads and faces of the spectators in the first few rows are lit by the main event and are crowded into the bottom third of the painting. Two spectators on our far left have climbed up and lean on and through the ropes, their mouths open. The crowd, which appears to be all light-skinned men and boys, are painted loosely but their mouths widen in toothy grins or are agape. The artist signed the work in yellow letters against black in the lower right corner: “Geo Bellows.” — *Both Members of This Club* by George Bellows (1909)

The final fireworks have exploded and the smoke has cleared the sky, meaning the countdown is on to the Fourth of July 2026, the United States’ big 2-5-0. Don Trump’s already talking about the party he intends to throw for the country, and listening to him go on about it makes me feel like a hostage, a weird sensation for a holiday that’s supposed to celebrate the glories of freedom and independence.

Apparently, as part of the semiquincentennial festivities, Trump wants to host a UFC fight on the White House grounds. Nothing against the UFC—not my thing, maybe it’s yours, that’s fine—but good God, we’re going to commemorate two-and-a-half centuries of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by inviting a fight club’s worth of mixed martial artists to the president’s house so they can beat the living shit out of each other for cash prizes? Some Americans are going to be pumped for this. As for the rest of us, well, welcome to the Octagon. Better get used to it.

Life in a capitalist, free-market society like the United States can feel like a UFC bout. You’re fighting a range of competitors: Other job applicants, co-workers chasing the same promotion, rivalrous firms out to grab your market share. You’re promised rewards if you win these fights. For a lot of people, though, the prize is simply getting to fight another day even as they continue to scrape by.

You don’t want to end up on the losing end of these fights. For some, losing means a change in lifestyle, like foregoing a home renovation, cancelling a vacation, or settling for a less expensive pair of tennis shoes. For others, however, it means having less to eat, moving in with your in-laws, hoping you don’t get sick because you no longer have health insurance, or worse.

If you want to come out on top, you better be in fighting shape. You need to be able to knock your opponent out and defend what’s yours. You need to be able to take a beating. If you get knocked down, you need to pick yourself up off the mat, recalibrate, find a way to keep going. You hold your fate in your fists. Survival of the fittest. The winners and losers get what they deserve. It’s a test of your individual self-worth, the never-ending fight of your life.

It’s always been like this in the United States. Consider George Bellows’ 1909 painting Both Members of This Club (above). Bellows was associated with the Ashcan School, a turn-of-the-century artistic movement known for its depictions of life in impoverished urban neighborhoods. Bellows’ 1913 painting Cliff Dwellers (below), set amidst the tenements of New York’s Lower East Side, is a prime example of the Ashcan style.

undefined — *Cliff Dwellers* by George Bellows (1913)

Both Members of This Club can be interpreted as a metaphor for life in early twentieth-century laissez-faire America. This was an era when the market reined supreme and industrialists and bankers commanded powerful monopolies and controlled vast sums of wealth. Meanwhile, millions toiled for low wages in dangerous work environments owned by these business titans. Muckrakers, progressives, and labor unions pushed for economic reforms that would improve the lives of the impoverished working class.

Yet many Americans resisted these appeals, arguing such reforms would stifle economic growth, reward workers beyond their true worth and desert, and unfairly punish the well-off, who they insisted had earned their wealth through their own initiative, business acumen, and risk-taking. More than anything else, however, the market’s defenders argued these reforms would upend the basic rule of the market, which held that in the market, every person was free to enter into a contract with another. Each person could weigh an offer and, based on their own assessment of the deal, accept or reject it. This arrangement maximized each individual’s freedom. By extension, government interventions in the market infringed on an individual’s personal liberty. Using this logic, the Supreme Court ruled in 1905 that a New York law that forbid bakeries from employing workers for more than ten hours per day or sixty hours per week was unconstitutional. As Justice Peckham wrote in Lochner v. New York, “The [Bakeshop] act is not, within any fair meaning of the term, a health law, but is an illegal interference with the rights of individuals, both employers and employees, to make contracts regarding labor upon such terms as they may think best, or which they may agree upon with the other parties to such contracts.”

Millions of Americans in that era resented the rich for not sharing their wealth, but many also admired these millionaires for their success in the free market. The more pressing feeling—what people felt on a day-to-day basis—was a sense of economic anxiety owing to their tenuous place in the competitive free market. When food, shelter, clothing, and health care are hard to come by, people are aware of how an injury, an illness, a run-in with the law, a negative encounter with a manager, a shift in the market, or a technological development might upend their work lives and leave them ruined. They were living on the economic edge, caught up in a death match against vaguely defined forces both within and beyond their control. Psychologically, it felt like they were one of the boxers in Bellows’ Both Members of This Club. They were bruised, battered, and bloodied; tough, yet barely hanging on; fighting for their survival against an indifferent opponent strong enough to knock them out. They have it all on the line, and the delighted onlookers wouldn’t have it any other way.

There’s an added wrinkle to Both Members of This Club. Unlike Stag at Sharkey’s (above), the first boxing painting Bellows’ completed in 1909, Both Members of This Club depicts a fight between men of different racial backgrounds. (The year before, Jack Johnson had become the first black world heavyweight boxing champion, triggering a backlash among whites. Author Jack London called for a “Great White Hope” to step into the ring to take the title away from Johnson. Immigration to the United States also peaked at around this time, which, not coincidentally, is when many states were busy passing eugenic laws.) I don’t know Bellows’ views on race, but the inclusion of a black fighter in his painting—and one who appears to be getting the better of his white opponent—reflects the way racial/ethnic and economic anxiety intersect: Not only do people fear losing their economic standing in society, but they also fear the racial/ethnic group they identify with (along with the advantages they have accrued over time) will be displaced by another racial/ethnic group that is new to the market. The new group is often considered dangerous because they are seen as “stealing” economic opportunities owed to native citizens or viewed as more willing to be exploited by the monied class due to their economic desperation and “cultural inferiority.”

The United States began taking steps to dull the sharp edges of capitalism around the time Bellows painted Both Members of This Club. Throughout much of the twentieth century, legislators at both the federal and state levels would pass laws aimed at raising wages, improving working conditions, and curtailing the power of corporations. They would also establish old-age pension and health care programs and create a social safety net to provide assistance to low-income workers and the unemployed. These programs didn’t completely eliminate the economic anxiety that came with living in a free-market economy, but they could provide some measure of relief by helping people through difficult times.

Beginning in the 1980s, however—just as deindustrialization, automation, and increased foreign competition began straining the economy—laissez-faire economic policies returned to prominence while support for the welfare state started to wane. While the government has initiated programs to assist those in need during this time (Obamacare is a good example) policymakers have typically favored free-market, pro-business initiatives over more direct interventions in the economy. The “Big Beautiful Bill” recently passed by the Republican Congress and signed into law by Don Trump continues this trend. The bill makes Trump’s 2017 tax cuts (which favored the rich) permanent, and pays for those cuts by slashing food assistance and making it more difficult for people to receive health care through Medicaid. Furthermore, because those tax cuts are not entirely paid for, the bill will add trillions of dollars to the deficit, which in the coming years will likely squeeze critical entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare that middle- and working-class Americans rely upon late in life.

The GOP’s “Big Beautiful Bill” comes along at a time when working-class Americans’ economic anxiety has surged. Many probably feel like one of those boxers in Bellows’ paintings. If Republicans cared about working-class Americans’ well-being, they may have admitted the wealthy have done extraordinarily well over the past fifty years and passed a bill that instead favored middle- to low-income earners. Such a bill may have included tax hikes on high-income earners and corporations, a universal health care program, and funding for child care and pre-K programs.

Instead, Republicans tell us the bill will ultimately benefit workers by stimulating the economy from the top down. It gives business owners the opportunity to expand their businesses, hire more workers, and raise wages. That’s not necessarily a bad idea, but no one expects the bill to actually work that way. We know from Trump’s 2017 bill that the tax cuts didn’t stimulate the economy. The wealthy mostly invested their tax cuts in the stock market and increased their personal wealth. We can expect that to happen again, only this time with added pain for lower-income Americans.

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So what’s the appeal of a bill like this, particularly for a supposedly populist Republican Party? Part of it has nothing to do with populism. It’s just straight-up greed, with an unreformed GOP working on behalf of their wealthy benefactors.

For others—the greedy included—the thing that makes the Big Beautiful Bill “beautiful” is its embrace of freedom, specifically the freedom of the market. It further removes government from peoples’ lives—lower taxes, fewer government programs that people lean on and that taxpayers need to fund (the less said about the bill’s business subsidies, the better)—so that the individual is more firmly in control of his or her own destiny. There’s an ideological purity to the bill. We are freer, even if life and the vagaries of the market leave many bound to food, health, and financial insecurity, even if life is crueler and more brutal.

It’s the freedom of the fighter—scratch and claw to get what’s yours, and fight like hell to come out on top. With that freedom comes the risk of getting knocked out, but the fighter knows they cannot truly experience freedom if there’s nothing meaningful at stake, that there’s no value to the reward if they have nothing meaningful to lose.

In moments of economic insecurity, many long for greater security. They reason they actually have more freedom if, for example, their finances are not consumed by health care bills brought on by an illness beyond their control. Paradoxically, however, many people—including many who feel economically insecure—long for the opposite. They want a free-market free-for-all. They want life to resemble that boxing match.

Why? Because they assume that’s what life is like already. They assume everyone is already out to get their own, and they’re ready to fight on those terms. If life is already like a boxing match, they don’t want to face off against an opponent to whom the state has given an undeserved or unearned advantage, particularly if that advantage has been paid for by taxing the winners’ rewards. They don’t want the state accommodating someone new to the fight, like an immigrant. They don’t want the state playing favorites (or even simply leveling the playing field) even if the state has a long history of discriminating against some of those in the fight. Those who embrace the fight would argue we all bring our advantages and disadvantages as fighters into the ring with us, so let’s leave it at that. No one ought to get extra help beyond that. That would be unfair.

But I would argue Trump and the MAGAverse take this one step further. For them, it’s not enough to put up a fight. It’s not even enough to win. They also need to see other people lose. Without someone lying broken and bloodied on the mat, the MAGAverse can’t know that they’re really winning, and if they don’t know that they’re winning, they don’t feel free.

When Trump hosts that UFC fight as part of the nation’s semiquincentennial, he is not just celebrating freedom as individual initiative or as a competitive, no-holds-barred free-market economy. He is celebrating freedom as winning, as domination, as the infliction of so much pain that his power over others goes unquestioned. Trump will associate himself with the winner of the match. The loser laying on the mat will stand-in for the fired government workers; the cowed foreign governments; the law firms, media organizations, and educational institutions who caved to his demands; his vanquished political enemies; the impoverished children in Africa; the sick and hungry here at home; the immigrants who have had their visas rescinded, who have been rounded up ICE, who have been detained in concentration camps, who have been deported to their home countries or third-party nations or locked-up and subjected to torture in foreign prisons without due process and without being found guilty in a court of law. In Don Trump’s America, you know you are free when you can make other people suffer.

One thing the second Trump administration is making clear is the inadequacy of freedom as the United States’ central political value. Make no mistake: Freedom is important and valuable, as anyone who has been denied freedom will attest to. But freedom in a democracy is too often equated with power and, in its extreme form (as Trump demonstrates) an illiberal desire to exert power over others. The latter is poisonous in a democratic society in which power must be shared and the rights of individuals must be respected.

After 250 years, it is unfortunate we as a nation have not developed a more sophisticated appreciation for freedom. We like it, but struggle to articulate what it is good for beyond a vague notion of “being able to do what I want to do.” We can do better. Here’s a start: Rather than place freedom on a pedestal, we might instead think about what freedom reveals about the nature of human dignity and the promise inherent to each and every individual. In this way, freedom becomes more than an aimless end unto itself, but one of many components necessary to human flourishing, the pursuit of a good life, and the creation of a society that promotes those goals. So rather than devote the coming year to a mindless celebration of freedom, my hope is that Americans will instead spend that time contemplating a higher, more humane calling for freedom and how we as a nation may dedicate our next 250 years to that cause.

From the American Prospect:

“The Alaska Gold Rush” by David Dayen

Vincent’s Picks: Dept. Q

Given the public’s interest in true-crime cold-case podcasts, it’s really no mystery why Netflix would greenlight a show like Dept. Q, a crime drama about a fictional detective unit in Scotland charged with investigating unsolved crimes. Chief Superintendent Moira Jacobson (Kate Dickie) even uses that rationale in the first episode to explain the creation of the titular department: The Scottish government has thrown a chunk of money to local police forces to take another look at cold cases as a way to signal to voters that they, too, care about these victims, their loved ones, and their lack of justice.

Of course, one of the main reasons these cases have gone cold is that the evidence (or lack thereof) didn’t lead to a culprit, which makes them inherently difficult to solve. (Those podcasts tend to focus on the juiciest, most promising cases rather than those that go nowhere.) Therefore, Jacobson is content to funnel most of that money into daily police operations (new laptops!) while tasking some poor bloke with the thankless task of reading through hundreds of files that lead to nowhere.

The person Jacobson picks for the job is Detective Chief Inspector Carl Morck, played by Matthew Goode (The Crown, A Discovery of Witches). Morck himself is the victim in a recent cold case: While responding to a stabbing in Edinburgh, a masked gunman appears out of nowhere to kill the responding officer and paralyze Morck’s partner James Hardy (Jamie Sives) with a bullet that also passes through Morck’s neck. The stabbing and the shooting remain unresolved when the frumpy, traumatized Morck returns to work months later. Any sympathy his fellow officers have for him burns away pretty quickly, as Morck is a misanthropic, acerbic Englishman whose colleagues are already used to snapping back at his sarcastic comments. One of the show’s delights is that Morck tends to get as good as he gives in these exchanges. He deserves it.

Morck is a jerk, a psychological mess (he’s supposed to attend counseling sessions with a therapist played by Kelly Macdonald, but finds the meetings pointless), and shouldn’t be working any new cases, so he’s the perfect person to lead the newly formed Department Q. Jacobson stashes him in a basement storeroom that was once what appears to be a locker room of some sort (the toilets are just sitting there out in the open). At first, Morck is allowed one assistant, a part-time middle-aged IT guy named Akram Salim (Alexej Manvelov). Akram worked as a detective in Syria before circumstances compelled him to flee to Scotland; as Morck quickly discerns, Akram is a perceptive investigator but not one who has always operated by the book. They are joined later by Morck’s partner Hardy (who works remotely from his hospital bed) and Detective Constable Rose Dickson (Leah Byrne), who is recovering from PTSD resulting from a car accident. They’ve all got issues; if work isn’t exactly therapeutic, it’s at least a distraction that gives them purpose.

If you don’t want the first episode spoiled, you should skip this paragraph. For their first case, Akram recommends reviewing the disappearance of prosecutor Merritt Lingard (Chloe Pirrie) who boarded a ferry four years ago with her non-verbal brother William (Tom Bulpett) but wasn’t onboard when it docked. Prior to her disappearance, Merritt had failed to secure the conviction of a businessman in a high-profile murder case and had received death threats. Beyond that, there are loose threads everywhere. Akram believes Merritt is still alive; Morck assumes she’s dead. What we learn at the end of the episode is that she is being held captive inside a hyperbaric chamber.

Dept. Q is based on a series of Danish crime novels by Jussi Adler-Olsen and developed for the screen by Scott Frank (The Queen’s Gambit) so whether you’re a fan of Nordic, British, or American crime stories, this show has you covered. It’s an absorbing mystery, one that loops back through suspects rather than eliminating them episode by episode, although they could have told a tighter story by shaving three or four episodes off its runtime. The supporting cast, which includes Mark Bonnar and Shirley Henderson, is excellent.

The main reason to watch this show, though, is for Matthew Goode’s performance. Goode’s Morck ambles into every scene not believing the crap he’s about to call out nor the crap he’s about to put up with, which is rather heedless for a guy we meet minutes before he is ambushed by a gunman. Maybe he figures he should be dead already or maybe it’s just how he operates, but Morck’s disdain for others is just as much disdain for himself. Yes, he’s arrogant and hardly someone I would want to work with, but by showing us how Morck’s been brought down to earth, Goode gives us a character we can pull for.

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Reason to Believe

In Don Trump's America, You Know You Are Free When You Can Make Other People Suffer

PLUS: A review of "Dept. Q" starring Matthew Goode

Signals and Noise

From Substack:

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From ProPublica:

From The New Republic:

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From the American Prospect:

Vincent’s Picks: Dept. Q

Exit Music: “Heaven or Las Vegas” by Cocteau Twins (1990, Heaven or Las Vegas)